There are few certainties about life in France, but there’s one thing about which I am almost sure – that no French person has ever read the excellent novel The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrinby David Nobbs, or for that matter seen the sitcom of the same name starring the equally excellent Leonard Rossiter. If the French had read/seen Reginald Perrin, there wouldn’t be a glaring barren patch in their cultural landscape.

I am referring not to the sitcom, which is also a glaring barren patch in French culture, but to the parsnip. Reginald Perrin had a habit of saying “parsnips” for no apparent reason, or for calling things parsnips when he couldn’t remember their real name. It was all part of his mid-life meltdown, and brought the vegetable to the forefront of British cultural awareness.

France, though, has steadfastly ignored the parsnip, despite its succulence, a sort of sweet potato tenderness with an almost citrussy tang. It is one of those vegetables, like turnips and swede, that the French classify as animal fodder.

When I took a parsnip into France 24′s TV studios last Friday (for a reason I will explain in a moment), one French producer asked why I’d brought in a medieval weapon. Another said no, it was a vegetable called, she thought, “parnais” (it is in fact a “panais”).

This ignorance is largely due, like so much else in the French consciousness, to wartime trauma. During World War Two, food shortages forced many people to eat things they would otherwise have turned their sophisticated noses up at, like turnips, swedes and parsnips. So after the war, they rejected them as a bad memory. (In the same way, of course, we Brits have an aversion to whale meat and powdered eggs, which makes it all the more surprising that until very recently, we were still capable of drinking coffee that tasted as if it had been made out of old army socks.)

However, things are finally changing in France. Maybe it has something to do with the dire economic situation, but over the past few months, the French have at last begun coming to terms with the idea that the human intestine can digest parsnips even in peacetime. And it’s all thanks to the Brits. This year, we have managed to flood their supermarkets with packets of parsnip crisps, and their popularity in fried form is the only explanation I can find for the raw parsnip’s sudden appearance in my local market. I am talking about ordinary market fruit and veg stalls in a fairly poor part of the north of Paris, not organic health-food fairs down in the Latin Quarter. The parsnip really has arrived, albeit in a minor way — they still fetch three times the price of potatoes, and are only on two stalls out of about 30.

Anyway, this explains why I took a real live parsnip into the TV studios. I was doing my occasional Friday spot on France 24, and had decided to talk about new cultural invaders. The Brits there all gave the large white carrot a wistful smile, remembering, no doubt, roast dinners of old. Meanwhile the abovementioned French staff’s first reaction was to eye it with suspicion. Though when I mentioned parsnip crisps, their expression did change, and they looked at it with renewed interest – a bit like when someone says to me, “oh, you’re the bloke who wrote A Year in the Merde?” Suddenly the boring-looking vegetable in front of them goes up slightly in their estimation.

The parsnip in its non-crisp form still has a way to go, but it’s getting there. By coincidence, on Friday I had lunch in a restaurant that always serves up tasty fresh veg with its plat du jour, and one of my friends took a bite of his légumes and held up his fork in surprise – “Parsnip!” he said. And unlike Reginald Perrin, it wasn’t because he’d forgotten the word for fork.